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MIT-Adobe Duo had created an app that lets you know the history of that significant place just by posing the camera lens at the place. This tech is demonstrated by the website historypin.com .

Frédo Durand and Soonmin Bae at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, with Aseem Agarwala of Adobe Systems in San Jose, California, turned to a technique called visual homing to come up with an answer (ACM Transactions On Graphics, DOI: 10.1145/1805964.1805968). Visual homing is used in robotics to send a machine to a precise location, such as a charging station.

The team's software runs on a laptop linked to a digital camera. The software compares the camera's view to a preloaded historical scene and provides instructions to adjust the camera's position and zoom to best match the scene.

The laptop is a temporary measure, however: "We envision the tool running directly on the camera," the team says.

Perfectly matching snapshots-in-progress with a photo taken in the same spot a hundred years ago is an awesome idea. Turns out, it's kind of hard. But Adobe and MIT have figured out a way to make it happen more accurately.